THE FÊTE DE GRANDPÈRE
Sojourners in New Orleans who take their afternoon drive down Esplanade
street will notice, across on the right, between it and that sorry
streak once fondly known as Champs Élysées, two or three large, old
houses, rising above the general surroundings and displaying
architectural features which identify them with an irrevocable past--a
past when the faithful and true Creole could, without fear of
contradiction, express his religious belief that the antipathy he felt
for the Américain invader was an inborn horror laid lengthwise in his
ante-natal bones by a discriminating and appreciative Providence. There
is, for instance, or was until lately, one house which some hundred and
fifteen years ago was the suburban residence of the old sea-captain
governor, Kerlerec. It stands up among the oranges as silent and gray as
a pelican, and, so far as we know, has never had one cypress plank added
or subtracted since its master was called to France and thrown into the
Bastile. Another has two dormer windows looking out westward, and, when
the setting sun strikes the panes, reminds one of a man with spectacles
standing up in an audience, searching for a friend who is not there and
will never come back. These houses are the last remaining--if, indeed,
they were not pulled down yesterday--of a group that once marked from
afar the direction of the old highway between the city's walls and the
suburb St. Jean. Here clustered the earlier aristocracy of the colony;
all that pretty crew of counts, chevaliers, marquises, colonels, dons,
etc., who loved their kings, and especially their kings' moneys, with an
_abandon_ which affected the accuracy of nearly all their accounts.
Among these stood the great mother-mansion of the Grandissimes. Do not
look for it now; it is quite gone. The round, white-plastered brick
pillars which held the house fifteen feet up from the reeking ground and
rose on loftily to sustain the great overspreading roof, or clustered in
the cool, paved basement; the lofty halls, with their multitudinous
glitter of gilded brass and twinkle of sweet-smelling wax-candles; the
immense encircling veranda, where twenty Creole girls might walk
abreast; the great front stairs, descending from the veranda to the
garden, with a lofty palm on either side, on whose broad steps forty
Grandissimes could gather on a birthday afternoon; and the belvidere,
whence you could see the cathedral, the Ursulines', the governor's
mansion, and the river, far away, shining between the villas of
Tchoupitoulas Coast--all have disappeared as entirely beyond recall as
the flowers that bloomed in the gardens on the day of this _fête de
grandpère_.
Odd to say, it was not the grandpère's birthday that had passed. For
weeks the happy children of the many Grandissime branches--the
Mandarins, the St. Blancards, the Brahmins--had been standing with
their uplifted arms apart, awaiting the signal to clap hands and jump,
and still, from week to week, the appointed day had been made to fall
back, and fall back before--what think you?--an inability to
understand Honoré.
It was a sad paradox in the history of this majestic old house that her
best child gave her the most annoyance; but it had long been so. Even in
Honoré's early youth, a scant two years after she had watched him, over
the tops of her green myrtles and white and crimson oleanders, go away,
a lad of fifteen, supposing he would of course come back a Grandissime
of the Grandissimes--an inflexible of the inflexibles--he was found
"inciting" (so the stately dames and officials who graced her front
veranda called it) a Grandissime-De Grapion reconciliation by means of
transatlantic letters, and reducing the flames of the old feud,
rekindled by the Fusilier-Nancanou duel, to a little foul smoke. The
main difficulty seemed to be that Honoré could not be satisfied with a
clean conscience as to his own deeds and the peace and fellowships of
single households; his longing was, and had ever been--he had inherited
it from his father--to see one unbroken and harmonious Grandissime
family gathering yearly under this venerated roof without reproach
before all persons, classes, and races with whom they had ever had to
do. It was not hard for the old mansion to forgive him once or twice;
but she had had to do it often. It seems no over-stretch of fancy to
say she sometimes gazed down upon his erring ways with a look of patient
sadness in her large and beautiful windows.
And how had that forbearance been rewarded? Take one short instance:
when, seven years before this present _fête de grandpère_, he came back
from Europe, and she (this old home which we cannot help but personify),
though in trouble then--a trouble that sent up the old feud flames
again--opened her halls to rejoice in him with the joy of all her
gathered families, he presently said such strange things in favor of
indiscriminate human freedom that for very shame's sake she hushed them
up, in the fond hope that he would outgrow such heresies. But he? On top
of all the rest, he declined a military commission and engaged in
commerce--"shopkeeping, _parbleu!_"
However, therein was developed a grain of consolation. Honoré became--as
he chose to call it--more prudent. With much tact, Agricola was amiably
crowded off the dictator's chair, to become, instead, a sort of
seneschal. For a time the family peace was perfect, and Honoré, by a
touch here to-day and a word there to-morrow, was ever lifting the name,
and all who bore it, a little and a little higher; when suddenly, as in
his father's day--that dear Numa who knew how to sacrifice his very
soul, as a sort of Iphigenia for the propitiation of the family gods--as
in Numa's day came the cession to Spain, so now fell this other cession,
like an unexpected tornado, threatening the wreck of her children's
slave-schooners and the prostration alike of their slave-made crops and
their Spanish liberties; and just in the fateful moment where Numa would
have stood by her, Honoré had let go. Ah, it was bitter!
"See what foreign education does!" cried a Mandarin de Grandissime of
the Baton Rouge Coast. "I am sorry now"--derisively--"that I never sent
_my_ boy to France, am I not? No! No-o-o! I would rather my son should
never know how to read, than that he should come back from Paris
repudiating the sentiments and prejudices of his own father. Is
education better than family peace? Ah, bah! My son make friends with
Américains and tell me they--that call a negro 'monsieur'--are as good
as his father? But that is what we get for letting Honoré become a
merchant. Ha! the degradation! Shaking hands with men who do not believe
in the slave trade! Shake hands? Yes; associate--fraternize! with
apothecaries and negrophiles. And now we are invited to meet at the
_fête de grandpère_, in the house where he is really the chief--the
_caçique!_"
No! The family would not come together on the first appointment; no, nor
on the second; no, not if the grandpapa did express his wish; no, nor on
the third--nor on the fourth.
"_Non, Messieurs_!" cried both youth and reckless age; and, sometimes,
also, the stronger heads of the family, the men of means, of force and
of influence, urged on from behind by their proud and beautiful wives
and daughters.
Arms, generally, rather than heads, ruled there in those days.
Sentiments (which are the real laws) took shape in accordance with the
poetry, rather than the reason, of things, and the community recognized
the supreme domination of "the gentleman" in questions of right and of
"the ladies" in matters of sentiment. Under such conditions strength
establishes over weakness a showy protection which is the subtlest of
tyrannies, yet which, in the very moment of extending its arm over
woman, confers upon her a power which a truer freedom would only
diminish; constitutes her in a large degree an autocrat of public
sentiment and thus accepts her narrowest prejudices and most belated
errors as veriest need-be's of social life.
The clans classified easily into three groups; there were those who
boiled, those who stewed, and those who merely steamed under a close
cover. The men in the first two groups were, for the most part, those
who were holding office under old Spanish commissions, and were daily
expecting themselves to be displaced and Louisiana thereby ruined. The
steaming ones were a goodly fraction of the family--the timid, the
apathetic, the "conservative." The conservatives found ease better than
exactitude, the trouble of thinking great, the agony of deciding
harrowing, and the alternative of smiling cynically and being liberal so
much easier--and the warm weather coming on with a rapidity-wearying to
contemplate.
"The Yankee was an inferior animal."
"Certainly."
"But Honoré had a right to his convictions."
"Yes, that was so, too."
"It looked very traitorous, however."
"Yes, so it did."
"Nevertheless, it might turn out that Honoré was advancing the true
interests of his people."
"Very likely."
"It would not do to accept office under the Yankee government."
"Of course not."
"Yet it would never do to let the Yankees get the offices, either."
"That was true; nobody could deny that."
"If Spain or France got the country back, they would certainly remember
and reward those who had held out faithfully."
"Certainly! That was an old habit with France and Spain."
"But if they did not get the country back--"
"Yes, that is so; Honoré is a very good fellow, and--"
And, one after another, under the mild coolness of Honoré's amiable
disregard, their indignation trickled back from steam to water, and they
went on drawing their stipends, some in Honoré's counting-room, where
they held positions, some from the provisional government, which had as
yet made but few changes, and some, secretly, from the cunning
Casa-Calvo; for, blow the wind east or blow the wind west, the affinity
of the average Grandissime for a salary abideth forever.
Then, at the right moment, Honoré made a single happy stroke, and even
the hot Grandissimes, they of the interior parishes and they of
Agricola's squadron, slaked and crumbled when he wrote each a letter
saying that the governor was about to send them appointments, and that
it would be well, if they wished to _evade_ them, to write the governor
at once, surrendering their present commissions. Well! Evade? They would
evade nothing! Do you think they would so belittle themselves as to
write to the usurper? They would submit to keep the positions first.
But the next move was Honoré's making the whole town aware of his
apostasy. The great mansion, with the old grandpère sitting out in
front, shivered. As we have seen, he had ridden through the Place
d'Armes with the arch-usurper himself. Yet, after all, a Grandissime
would be a Grandissime still; whatever he did he did openly. And wasn't
that glorious--never to be ashamed of anything, no matter how bad? It
was not everyone who could ride with the governor.
And blood was so much thicker than vinegar that the family, that would
not meet either in January or February, met in the first week of March,
every constituent one of them.
The feast has been eaten. The garden now is joyous with children and
the veranda resplendent with ladies. From among the latter the eye
quickly selects one. She is perceptibly taller than the others; she sits
in their midst near the great hall entrance; and as you look at her
there is no claim of ancestry the Grandissimes can make which you would
not allow. Her hair, once black, now lifted up into a glistening
snow-drift, augments the majesty of a still beautiful face, while her
full stature and stately bearing suggest the finer parts of Agricola,
her brother. It is Madame Grandissime, the mother of Honoré.
One who sits at her left, and is very small, is a favorite cousin. On
her right is her daughter, the widowed señora of José Martinez; she has
wonderful black hair and a white brow as wonderful. The commanding
carriage of the mother is tempered in her to a gentle dignity and calm,
contrasting pointedly with the animated manners of the courtly matrons
among whom she sits, and whose continuous conversation takes this
direction or that, at the pleasure of Madame Grandissime.
But if you can command your powers of attention, despite those children
who are shouting Creole French and sliding down the rails of the front
stair, turn the eye to the laughing squadron of beautiful girls, which
every few minutes, at an end of the veranda, appears, wheels and
disappears, and you note, as it were by flashes, the characteristics of
face and figure that mark the Louisianaises in the perfection of the
new-blown flower. You see that blondes are not impossible; there,
indeed, are two sisters who might be undistinguishable twins but that
one has blue eyes and golden hair. You note the exquisite pencilling of
their eyebrows, here and there some heavier and more velvety, where a
less vivacious expression betrays a share of Spanish blood. As
Grandissimes, you mark their tendency to exceed the medium Creole
stature, an appearance heightened by the fashion of their robes. There
is scarcely a rose in all their cheeks, and a full red-ripeness of the
lips would hardly be in keeping; but there is plenty of life in their
eyes, which glance out between the curtains of their long lashes with a
merry dancing that keeps time to the prattle of tongues. You are not
able to get a straight look into them, and if you could you would see
only your own image cast back in pitiful miniature; but you turn away
and feel, as you fortify yourself with an inward smile, that they know
you, you man, through and through, like a little song. And in turning,
your sight is glad to rest again on the face of Honoré's mother. You
see, this time, that she _is_ his mother, by a charm you had overlooked,
a candid, serene and lovable smile. It is the wonder of those who see
that smile that she can ever be harsh.
The playful, mock-martial tread of the delicate Creole feet is all at
once swallowed up by the sound of many heavier steps in the hall, and
the fathers, grandfathers, sons, brothers, uncles and nephews of the
great family come out, not a man of them that cannot, with a little
care, keep on his feet. Their descendants of the present day sip from
shallower glasses and with less marked results.
The matrons, rising, offer the chief seat to the first comer, the
great-grandsire--the oldest living Grandissime--Alcibiade, a shaken but
unfallen monument of early colonial days, a browned and corrugated
souvenir of De Vaudreuil's pomps, of O'Reilly's iron rule, of Galvez'
brilliant wars--a man who had seen Bienville and Zephyr Grandissime.
With what splendor of manner Madame Fusilier de Grandissime offers, and
he accepts, the place of honor! Before he sits down he pauses a moment
to hear out the companion on whose arm he had been leaning. But
Théophile, a dark, graceful youth of eighteen, though he is recounting
something with all the oblivious ardor of his kind, becomes instantly
silent, bows with grave deference to the ladies, hands the aged
forefather gracefully to his seat, and turning, recommences the recital
before one who hears all with the same perfect courtesy--his beloved
cousin Honoré.
Meanwhile, the gentlemen throng out. Gallant crew! These are they who
have been pausing proudly week after week in an endeavor (?) to
understand the opaque motives of Numa's son.
In the middle of the veranda pauses a tall, muscular man of fifty, with
the usual smooth face and an iron-gray queue. That is Colonel Agamemnon
Brahmin de Grandissime, purveyor to the family's military pride,
conservator of its military glory, and, after Honoré, the most admired
of the name. Achille Grandissime, he who took Agricola away from
Frowenfeld's shop in the carriage, essays to engage Agamemnon in
conversation, and the colonel, with a glance at his kinsman's nether
limbs and another at his own, and with that placid facility with which
the graver sort of Creoles take up the trivial topics of the lighter,
grapples the subject of boots. A tall, bronzed, slender young man, who
prefixes to Grandissime the maternal St. Blancard, asks where his wife
is, is answered from a distance, throws her a kiss and sits down on a
step, with Jean Baptiste de Grandissime, a piratical-looking
black-beard, above him, and Alphonse Mandarin, an olive-skinned boy,
below. Valentine Grandissime, of Tchoupitoulas, goes quite down to the
bottom of the steps and leans against the balustrade. He is a large,
broad-shouldered, well-built man, and, as he stands smoking a cigar,
with his black-stockinged legs crossed, he glances at the sky with the
eye of a hunter--or, it may be, of a sailor.
"Valentine will not marry," says one of two ladies who lean over the
rail of the veranda above. "I wonder why."
The other fixes on her a meaning look, and she twitches her shoulders
and pouts, seeing she has asked a foolish question, the answer to which
would only put Valentine in a numerous class and do him no credit.
Such were the choice spirits of the family. Agricola had retired. Raoul
was there; his pretty auburn head might have been seen about half-way up
the steps, close to one well sprinkled with premature gray.
"No such thing!" exclaimed his companion.
(The conversation was entirely in Creole French.)
"I give you my sacred word of honor!" cried Raoul.
"That Honoré is having all his business carried on in English?" asked
the incredulous Sylvestre. (Such was his name.)
"I swear--" replied Raoul, resorting to his favorite pledge--"on a stack
of Bibles that high!"
"Ah-h-h-h, pf-f-f-f-f!"
This polite expression of unbelief was further emphasized by a spasmodic
flirt of one hand, with the thumb pointed outward.
"Ask him! ask him!" cried Raoul.
"Honoré!" called Sylvestre, rising up. Two or three persons passed the
call around the corner of the veranda.
Honoré came with a chain of six girls on either arm. By the time he
arrived, there was a Babel of discussion.
"Raoul says you have ordered all your books and accounts to be written
in English," said Sylvestre.
"Well?"
"It is not true, is it?"
"Yes."
The entire veranda of ladies raised one long-drawn, deprecatory "Ah!"
except Honoré's mother. She turned upon him a look of silent but intense
and indignant disappointment.
"Honoré!" cried Sylvestre, desirous of repairing his defeat, "Honoré!"
But Honoré was receiving the clamorous abuse of the two half dozens of
girls.
"Honoré!" cried Sylvestre again, holding up a torn scrap of
writing-paper which bore the marks of the counting-room floor and of a
boot-heel, "how do you spell 'la-dee?'"
There was a moment's hush to hear the answer.
"Ask Valentine," said Honoré.
Everybody laughed aloud. That taciturn man's only retort was to survey
the company above him with an unmoved countenance, and to push the ashes
slowly from his cigar with his little finger. M. Valentine Grandissime,
of Tchoupitoulas, could not read.
"Show it to Agricola," cried two or three, as that great man came out
upon the veranda, heavy-eyed, and with tumbled hair.
Sylvestre, spying Agricola's head beyond the ladies, put the question.
"How is it spelled on that paper?" retorted the king of beasts.
"L-a-y--"
"Ignoramus!" growled the old man.
"I did not spell it," cried Raoul, and attempted to seize the paper. But
Sylvestre throwing his hand behind him, a lady snatched the paper, two
or three cried "Give it to Agricola!" and a pretty boy, whom the
laughter and excitement had lured from the garden, scampered up the
steps and handed it to the old man.
"Honoré!" cried Raoul, "it must not be read. It is one of your private
matters."
But Raoul's insinuation that anybody would entrust him with a private
matter brought another laugh.
Honoré nodded to his uncle to read it out, and those who could not
understand English, as well as those who could, listened. It was a paper
Sylvestre had picked out of a waste-basket on the day of Aurore's visit
to the counting-room. Agricola read:
"What is that layde want in thare with Honoré?"
"Honoré is goin giv her bac that proprety--that is
Aurore De Grapion what Agricola kill the husband."
That was the whole writing, but Agricola never finished. He was reading
aloud--"that is Aurore De Grap--"
At that moment he dropped the paper and blackened with wrath; a sharp
flash of astonishment ran through the company; an instant of silence
followed and Agricola's thundering voice rolled down upon Sylvestre in a
succession of terrible imprecations.
It was painful to see the young man's face as, speechless, he received
this abuse. He stood pale and frightened, with a smile playing about his
mouth, half of distress and half of defiance, that said as plain as a
smile could say, "Uncle Agricola, you will have to pay for
this mistake."
As the old man ceased, Sylvestre turned and cast a look downward to
Valentine Grandissime, then walked up the steps, and passing with a
courteous bow through the group that surrounded Agricola, went into the
house. Valentine looked at the zenith, then at his shoe-buckles, tossed
his cigar quietly into the grass and passed around a corner of the house
to meet Sylvestre in the rear.
Honoré had already nodded to his uncle to come aside with him, and
Agricola had done so. The rest of the company, save a few male figures
down in the garden, after some feeble efforts to keep up their spirits
on the veranda, remarked the growing coolness or the waning daylight,
and singly or in pairs withdrew. It was not long before Raoul, who had
come up upon the veranda, was left alone. He seemed to wait for
something, as, leaning over the rail while the stars came out, he sang
to himself, in a soft undertone, a snatch of a Creole song:
"La pluie--la pluie tombait,
Crapaud criait,
Moustique chantait--"
The moon shone so brightly that the children in the garden did not break
off their hide-and-seek, and now and then Raoul suspended the murmur of
his song, absorbed in the fate of some little elf gliding from one black
shadow to crouch in another. He was himself in the deep shade of a
magnolia, over whose outer boughs the moonlight was trickling, as if the
whole tree had been dipped in quicksilver.
In the broad walk running down to the garden gate some six or seven dark
forms sat in chairs, not too far away for the light of their cigars to
be occasionally seen and their voices to reach his ear; but he did not
listen. In a little while there came a light footstep, and a soft,
mock-startled "Who is that?" and one of that same sparkling group of
girls that had lately hung upon Honoré came so close to Raoul, in her
attempt to discern his lineaments, that their lips accidentally met.
They had but a moment of hand-in-hand converse before they were hustled
forth by a feminine scouting party and thrust along into one of the
great rooms of the house, where the youth and beauty of the Grandissimes
were gathered in an expansive semicircle around a languishing fire,
waiting to hear a story, or a song, or both, or half a dozen of each,
from that master of narrative and melody, Raoul Innerarity.
"But mark," they cried unitedly, "you have got to wind up with the story
of Bras-Coupé!"
"A song! A song!"
"_Une chanson Créole! Une chanson des nègres!_"
"Sing 'yé tolé dancé la doung y doung doung!'" cried a black-eyed girl.
Raoul explained that it had too many objectionable phrases.
"Oh, just hum the objectionable phrases and go right on."
But instead he sang them this:
"_La prémier' fois mo té 'oir li,
Li té posé au bord so lit;
Mo di', Bouzon, bel n'amourèse!
L'aut' fois li té si' so la saise
Comme vié Madam dans so fauteil,
Quand li vivé cóté soleil.
So giés yé té plis noir passé la nouitte,
So dé la lev' plis doux passe la quitte!
Tou' mo la vie, zamein mo oir
Ein n' amourèse zoli comme ça!
Mo' blié manzé--mo' blié boir'--
Mo' blié tout dipi ç' temps-là--
Mo' blié parlé--mo' blié dormi,
Quand mo pensé aprés zami!_"
"And you have heard Bras-Coupé sing that, yourself?"
"Once upon a time," said Raoul, warming with his subject, "we were
coming down from Pointe Macarty in three pirogues. We had been three
days fishing and hunting in Lake Salvador. Bras-Coupé had one pirogue
with six paddles--"
"Oh, yes!" cried a youth named Baltazar; "sing that, Raoul!"
And he sang that.
"But oh, Raoul, sing that song the negroes sing when they go out in the
bayous at night, stealing pigs and chickens!"
"That boat song, do you mean, which they sing as a signal to those on
shore?" He hummed.
[Illustration: Music]
"Dé zabs, dé zabs, dé counou ouaïe ouaïe,
Dé zabs, dé zabs, dé counou ouaïe ouaïe,
Counou ouaïe ouaïe ouaïe ouaïe,
Counou ouaïe ouaïe ouaïe ouaïe,
Counou ouaïe ouaïe ouaïe, momza;
Momza, momza, momza, momza,
Roza, roza, roza-et--momza."
This was followed by another and still another, until the hour began to
grow late. And then they gathered closer around him and heard the
promised story. At the same hour Honoré Grandissime, wrapping himself in
a greatcoat and giving himself up to sad and somewhat bitter
reflections, had wandered from the paternal house, and by and by from
the grounds, not knowing why or whither, but after a time soliciting, at
Frowenfeld's closing door, the favor of his company. He had been feeling
a kind of suffocation. This it was that made him seek and prize the
presence and hand-grasp of the inexperienced apothecary. He led him out
to the edge of the river. Here they sat down, and with a laborious
attempt at a hard and jesting mood, Honoré told the same dark story.